Florida School Shooting Suspect Will Face the Death Penalty

Cruz's defense attorneys previously said the young man would plead guilty if prosecutors did not seek the death penalty.

Prosecutors will seek the death penalty against Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz, the Broward State Attorney's Office announced Tuesday. While they continue to acknowledge that he carried out the rampage, they cannot plead guilty while Cruz could be sentenced to death, Finkelstein said Tuesday.

"We still stand ready to immediately plead guilty to 34 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole", Howard Finkelstein, a county public defender, wrote in an email. "Cruz will rot in hell no matter when it is that he arrives there". Not, did he do it?

The shooting has sparked a fierce national debate over gun rights, with numerous student survivors vowing to push for gun control regulations so that the shooting they lived through might be the last. The former Stoneman Douglas student is charged with 17 counts of murder.

A 15-year-old student is improving after falling critically ill from an intestinal infection weeks after being shot five times at his Florida school shooting. After surgeries, his condition was upgraded to fair, his attorney and the hospital said.

The family's attorney says that after surgeries, his intestinal area has been sealed off. Alex Arreaza says the student is breathing on his own after being taken off a ventilator. "What they're saying is, that these weapons of mass destruction that do nothing but tear human beings apart in an unbelievable way, do not belong in civilian hands".